Das Narayandas

Das Narayandas is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is currently the Senior Associate Dean, External Relations and Harvard Business Publishing. His academic credentials include a Bachelor of Technology degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, (which honored him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2019), a Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, (which honored him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2014), and a Ph.D. in Management from Purdue University.

Das previously has been Senior Associate Dean, Executive Education, Chair of the Executive Education Advanced Management Program and the Program for Leadership Development, as well as course head of the required first-year Marketing course in the MBA program. Prior to that, he taught the Business Marketing Elective in the MBA program. Das has twice been selected as the Class Day faculty speaker (2001 and 2004), and has received the award for teaching excellence from the graduating HBS MBA Class on several occasions. Other awards include The Robert F. Greenhill Award for Outstanding Service to the HBS Community (two-time recipient), the Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching.

Das's background includes management experience in sales and marketing that involved field strategic planning, field salesforce management, new product development, channel management and marketing communications. Das has co-authored two books and his articles have appeared in publications that include Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Sloan Management Review. Das has been quoted in publications such as The Economist and U.S. News and World Report amongst others.

Das currently serves on the Board of Directors of AllianceBernstein and Titan Industries (India). In addition, Das is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore, and the Harvard-IESE Committee.

The need for leadership development has never been more urgent. Companies of all sorts realize that to survive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, they need different leadership skills and organizational capabilities from those that helped them succeed in the past at all levels of the firm. But the leadership development industry is in a state of upheaval. The number of players offering courses to impart the hard and soft skills required of corporate managers has expanded well beyond traditional business schools, corporate universities, and dedicated consultancies. And yet organizations that spend billions of dollars annually to train current and future executives are growing frustrated with the results.

Twenty-four-year old Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of India-based online hotel branding network OYO Rooms, has tackled the issue of unreliability in India's highly fragmented budget hotel industry. In 2018, OYO branded 8,500 properties across 200 cities and managed to capture almost 1.5% of India's budget hotel market. Ritesh believes that in the process, OYO has honed technological skills and infrastructural capabilities that can transform the company from being a technology player to a hotel developer. OYO now aspires to convert corporate spaces and homes into accommodation spaces and to make its mark worldwide.

Even as the demand for managerial skills continues to grow, executive education worldwide has entered a period of disruption caused by the digitalization of content, connectivity, and communication. The current offerings of many executive education program providers fall short of creating new skills in executives and developing fresh capabilities for organizations. Based on a study of all the programs offered by the business schools, consultancies, corporate universities, and online education providers, we analyze the advantages, and the constraints, of the existing programs. We also map the vehicles for skill development—such as case discussions, lectures, simulations, coaching sessions, live projects, etc.,—in terms of their potential to develop executives for the future. We then examine the impact of the forces of digital disruption—the disaggregation and disintermediation of activity chains and the decoupling of the sources of value in education programs—on the future of executive education.

Founded in 2007 as an online book retailer, Flipkart rapidly became the largest e-commerce player in India, valued at almost $15 billion. However, it faced intense competition from other e-commerce players like Amazon and Snapdeal. Over the years Flipkart was slowly moving from an online retailer to a marketplace model and in early 2015 it made the strategic decision to accelerate this transition where it planned to attract over 100,000 sellers. Is the transition to a full marketplace model the right decision for Flipkart? What would it require to make this strategy work? And when and how would Flipkart become profitable?

In the fall of 2016, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, an Indian mobile payments and commerce platform, received the coveted "Entrepreneur of the Year" award from the EconomicTimes, a leading Indian business newspaper. Despite the public honor and success, Sharma was not content. He had loftier plans: "I want to leave behind a legacy of building India's first $100 billion company that can get replicated in the world."

Companies typically compensate their sales force by using some combination of salary, commission, and bonuses, but executives are often unsure which incentives provide the best motivation. Should bonuses be tied to quotas or should they be given unconditionally? Is it better to use bonuses as a reward or as a punishment? A randomized field experiment at a large Indian company investigated these questions, finding that conditional bonuses were more than twice as effective as unconditional bonuses. The results have implications for companies trying to use bonuses to more effectively manage their salespeople.

Executive development programs have entered a period of disruption catalyzed by the digitalization of content, connectivity, and communication and are driven by renewed demand for high-level executive and managerial skills.

Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven on one side by the proliferation of a new technological, cultural, and economic landscape commonly referred to as "digital distruption" and on the other by a widening gap between skills and capabilities.

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of various forms of conditional and unconditional compensation. We account for salesperson heterogeneity by using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate our model. We find conditional compensation in the form of quota-bonus incentives to improve performance; however, it may lead to lower future performance. We find little evidence that effectiveness differs between a quota-bonus plan and a punitive-bonus plan framed as a penalty for not achieving quota. We find unconditional compensation in the form of reciprocity to be effective at improving sales force performance only when given as a delayed reward of which the effectiveness decreases with repeated exposure. We also find heterogeneity in the impact of compensation on performance across salespeople; unconditional compensation is more effective for salespeople with high base performance, whereas conditional compensation is equally effective across all types of salespeople.